What is awakening?

In the Buddhist traditions (as well as other spiritual traditions), meditation is practiced as a means to awakening. What’s that? We could not really worry about the word awakening, and just accept that meditation leads in a direction in which we want to go in, and just get on with the practice. For some people, that will be just fine, and wise.

Alternatively, we could just accept the simple definition in the 4 Noble Truths of Buddhism, that awakening is the end of suffering, but this might not be enough to give us a sense of where meditation practice can lead. It might also sound quite abstract, or completely impossible, or uninspiring.

The name Buddha literally means “The Awakened One”. The idea of awakening is thus absolutely central to Buddhism.

It’s not an easy idea to talk about, for a number of reasons. As a direct, lived shift in how life is experienced, awakening can never be fully captured in language. Even this phrase - “a direct, lived shift in how life is experienced” - is a poor and limiting description of awakening. In most spiritual traditions, Buddhist or otherwise, awakening involves profound insight into the nature of reality, which is beyond ordinary conceptualization.

Is awakening a thing?

Talking about awakening as a thing has risks. If we define something called awakening, and posit it as the goal of practice, then we may be setting up a fixed endpoint for our path of meditation, which we then strive towards. This can be helpful, but has several possible downsides:

Striving towards a goal can lead to self-judgement and hopelessness when we feel we’re not making much progress, and possibly the extremely unhelpful categorisation of humans into those who are awakened and those who are not.
Any conception of awakening will necessarily be limited (which is the case for any truly rich concept, like “love” or “beauty”), and so if we’re stuck to one particular end goal, we might limit the potential fruits of our meditation practice.
If we’re on the march towards something we’re calling awakening, we might over-emphasise big, sudden shifts in our understanding and practice, and check out a bit when things are more “vanilla” (which they usually are!)
If awakening is a thing, and I need to get there, I may be “reaching forward”, away from my present experience, trying to make something artificial happen. This is not a good attitude for practice.

Not talking about awakening also has risks, however. Although there are good reasons to be cautious about how we speak about it, as I outlined above, we also need to have some sense of the direction(s) in which practice can lead.

Sometimes a reluctance to entertain ideas around awakening stem from a lack of self-belief. Some people feel that if awakening is real, it will become just another unattainable goal, and distract from the real point of meditation practice. However, completely shying away from talking about awakening as a possibility of practice has downsides too.

Profound shifts in the way we experience ourselves, the world and our place in it are possible through practice. If we don’t have some sense of these possibilities (whether we call them awakening or something else), we may severely limit ourselves. Our conception of what is theoretically possible for a human consciousness will affect what is practically possible for our human consciousness.

Having some sense of profound possibility - a sense of where practice may take us, where we deeply would love to explore, is one of the most helpful things we can have as practitioners. I will discuss in brief some Buddhist views of awakening, but what is really important is that you feel a sense of meaning and purpose in your own meditation practice. This meaning and purpose is your battery that keeps you going when things feel pointless or dull. It leads you on to ever new territory.

You can have your own sense of where practice leads, and what really matters is that it truly resonates with you, rather than being just something that someone else has told you that you should care about.

What is awakening? Some descriptions

In Theravāda Buddhism

In the Pali Canon, the story is told of the Buddha’s awakening, which is described as the moment in which the Buddha realised the four noble truths. A lot is contained within this realisation - including the emptiness of self (the lack of a fixed, separate essence).

It is a profound realisation of the true nature of reality, which also implies the cessation of suffering and the extinction of the delusion that is its root cause. This awakening is not just an intellectual understanding but a direct, experiential insight into the impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anattā) nature of all phenomena.

In short: because one is no longer deluded about the nature of the self and experiences, one does not crave things to be this way or that way, and one ceases to suffer.

In Zen Buddhism

Zen emphasises the non-conceptual, non-dual aspect of awakening (which is present, although less explicitly, in the Theravada view, which emphasises the end of suffering more strongly).

“Satori [awakening] is an experience which no amount of explanation or argument can make communicable to others unless the latter themselves had it previously. If satori is amenable to analysis in the sense that by so doing it becomes perfectly clear to another who has never had it, that satori will be no satori.”

DT Suzuki

In Advaita Vedanta

In Advaita Vedanta (a non-dual Hindu tradition that emerged in India and may have been influenced by Buddhism, and influenced Buddhism in turn), awakening is the recognition of one’s true nature as non-dual consciousness. The illusion of separation between the self as the subject of experience, and experience itself, is seen through. Therefore, one knows their most true identity - consciousness itself.

Other traditions

The idea of awakening is not confined to the great Indian spiritual traditions. Sufism, Christian mysticism and Kabbalistic Judaism also have similar ideas (see Rumi & Meister Eckhart).

What’s common to ideas of awakening?

All conceptions of awakening have some things in common:

Moving beyond a limited sense of self: What do we wake up from? The delusion that we are unitary individuals, separate from the rest of the universe.
Unity, interconnectedness, emptiness, non-duality: these ideas are all very closely related (I’m aware we haven’t really defined any of these, that would take far too long). In the end, I think there’s a good argument to be made that they ultimately point to the same reality. Since reality itself is beyond concepts, each of these ways of describing reality must be partial views - a particular perspective on something ultimately ineffable.
Lessening, or ending, of personal suffering: because one's perspective is no longer bound up with the experience of the self, or “ego”, one no longer suffers with the pains and losses of the individual.

Awakening is best thought of as a spectrum, a direction, or a territory, rather than a point

It may seem that most of these definitions of awakening are quite binary - you either understand that you are not separate from everything else, and that is your lived experience, or not. It’s important to see, though, that this is not the case. You’re not either in, or out. There’s a direction (or rather a range of similar directions) that we are following in our practice, and we move into that territory. Each step brings gifts, we don’t need to wait until some grand event.

Each moment of new understanding, each untying of mental, physical and emotional knots, each experience of beauty and meaning are mini-awakenings. We should appreciate and enjoy these, as these are mostly what moves us along the path.

Occasionally, we may experience some bigger shift - some new way of perceiving or understanding that feels transformative. It may last minutes, hours, days or weeks, or longer. These bigger “awakenings” should be treasured, too.

Each time we experience an “ah-ha” moment, we are making progress towards the things that we really care about in our path. There will inevitably be ups and downs, and sometimes we may feel like our insights count for nothing, when we find ourselves once again mired in the pain of our individual suffering. However, our “baseline” has shifted, and we will find that when conditions once again become more favourable, the insights and understandings we have accrued are still there with us, in a less obvious way, baked into the fabric of our being.

It’s important to reflect on the new understandings that your meditation practice has already given you. Appreciate this, and keep in mind some sense of potential for more. Really, there is no fixed end to practise. There is always something beyond where we are. Something that leads us onward. This is very liberating - wherever I am, I can grow, learn, become more free. What’s important is that my ideas about meditation practice are supporting, and not hindering, this.

If I believe that there is potential for positive shifts in my way of experiencing life, this will be a possibility for me. If I don’t, it may be less possible.

How to think of awakening?

Let’s listen to the Buddhist masters (and masters of other contemplative traditions), and see if we can be inspired and intrigued. More importantly, though, it’s helpful to see awakening as a never-ending process through an ever-new territory. Let’s be excited and interested to experience more deeply the mystery of life, rather than simply trying to replicate something we’ve read. This will actually, paradoxically, help us to understand better what the masters are talking about!